George
Pór is an evolutionary thinker, Teal mentor, and advisor
to culture change and system transition in organisations.

Gallup research shows
that, worldwide, only 13%
of employees
are engaged in their jobs. The statistic is shocking and means
more than three-quarters of employees are wasting their time,
energy, and their organisations resources. How can we mobilize
the creativity and collective intelligence in our organisations
to turn this around?

For a challenge this
massive, we need more than yesterdays mindsets and leadership
development approaches.

The crisis of employee
engagement, like any of our global crises, cannot be solved by
todays dominant modes of thinking. The next cycle
is the one of an integral, holistic consciousness that enables
the integration of the inner and outer technologies and sciences,
deep intuition and systems thinking, spirituality and precision
of inquiry.[1] We need to develop competences in each. The
sooner the better.

Think of it as scaling
a mountain. As we ascend, we leave useless, old stuff beside the
path, stuff that burdens and blinkers us. The climb is worth it,
though. When we get to the top, we gain an eagle-eye perspective.
We now enjoy a broader view. We see realities that were previously
hidden from us. And we see how everything is interconnected. As
our insight deepens, so does our compassion andinner
coherence.

As we scale the mountain,
we renew ourselves personally and professionally, and step more
fully into our potential. Looking back, we wonder how we ever
believed in the myth of controlling people, predicting the future,
or escaping the consequences of an unhealthy life. And we know
that we couldnt have made this journey alone. Not this quickly
and not this smoothly.

Our sherpa guides
or mentors have been here before. They know how to guide us through
the shortcuts and rocky terrain. Thats because they have
honed the capacity to sense, think, and relate from a more expansive
sense of self. They also help us unlearn unproductive habits and
drop them beside the path.

As a mentor who guides
leaders in next-stage organisations, I can share with you a few
things I have learned so far. Some of it comes from the three
breakthroughs that Frederic Laloux discovered while researching
and writing his book. Their implications are far-reaching, practical,
and powerful. Not only can we reinvent our organisations, but
also ourselves, and the way we develop as leaders. Lets
look into how.

Evolutionary Purpose

You may be tempted
to start by wondering where your organisation could evolve to
next or how it could reach its creative potential. However, that
is step two. Step one is discovering that breakthrough in your
own self.

This is not about
deciding what youll be when you grow up. And its not
about pushing forward with your head or will. To get clarity about
your evolutionary purpose, it is best to bypass the analytical
mind for a little while. Instead, ask the question who is
the world inviting you to be, in service of creating a future
that we all want? and listen to the answer that comes from
your heart. Or ask simply where are your deepest talents and highest
aspirations meeting a need in your world, one that you feel passionately
called to address.

Take time to re-read
either of those questions that speak to you. Sit with it for a
moment. Even better, move away from the computer, take your question
to a quiet corner or take it for a walk. Turn your attention to
your breath. Know that there is a creative impulse within you,
and it wants to manifest through you. But it can only reveal its
secret when you become silent or still enough to hear its whisper.

A more psychological
way to access your inner wisdom is to access your intuition and
ask: what kind of work gives me the greatest joy? What is the
need/tension in my world that is crying loudest for my help? Where
the answers to those questions dovetail, thats where you
will find your evolutionary purpose. At least, for now.

I ask myself these
questions at least once a year, on my birthday, keeping them fresh,
vibrant and dynamic. I use them as a North Star on my journey.

Self-Management

Leading by example
is par for the course in self-managed organisations. As Laloux
says, an organisation cannot evolve beyond its leaderships
stage of development. This makes your personal development
more than personal. You need to embody the qualities you want
to inspire in others. And you need to operate from a deeper knowledge
of both yourself and the work environment than what is required
in a traditional workplace.

This involves gaining
a high level of knowledge about your organisations operating
conditions and the various roles and accountabilities that dovetail
with yours. Only then can you use your creative potential to the
fullest and contribute to the whole.

It gets personal.
As a leader, your self-management includes the capacity to recognize
your needs, values, and moods, and the skills to manage the latter.
That calls for moment-to-moment awareness of what is arising from
within, as well as the tensions and opportunities for individual
action arising from the workplace. Only then can you, as an individual
along with groups of individuals, develop skills and practices
that allow everyone to work together harmoniously under any conditions,
even in the most challenging situations.

Developing quiet-mind
muscles, in addition to the active-mind muscles you already have,
is crucial. This involves stilling yourself enough to gather information
through mindful attention, sensing, and feeling. This is about
being present, receptive, and simply being.

You can try this
right now. As you read the rest of this blog, simultaneously keep
some of your attention on your breath. It is as if you are attending
the words in one hand, and your breath in the other, and you are
aware of both. This is not an easy practice because the mind tends
to jump to either the sentence or the breath instead of remaining
alert to both. With practice, you can become better at it.

Try this the next
time you talk with someone. Pay attention to your breath or heartbeat
while fully absorbing what you hear from the other person. Notice
how this changes the quality of your presence.

Quiet-mind skills
include self-reflection,
sense-making,
and perspective-taking.
They help you nurture the unfolding leadership qualities in yourself
and in each member of the organisation. I sense another blog about
them in the making

Wholeness

Imagine dropping
your professional mask and bringing the whole of who you are to
work. This is what happens in next-stage organisations. You are
free to show up in an authentic way without hiding your vulnerability.
You are in touch with your emotions and able to express even the
so-called negative ones, without harming others. Like
you, they value genuine relationships and have no need to to play
games or to play nice.

Another aspect of
wholeness is about developing a portfolio of the roles you energize,
both personally and professionally. Which of your talents come
out to play in each role? How do your roles strengthen each other?
Which of your roles can generate the larges ripple effects on
others roles, and then impact the whole. In this way you
learn to optimize your contribution and impact on the whole organisation.

This also applies
to the totality of your lifework roles, which I illustratedhere.
So, reinventing leadership development has to also address the
ways in which you, as a leader, can optimise the investment of
your attention/energy in multiple contexts.

These are some of
the wholeness competencies you may want to develop: conflict resolution;
intuition; imagination; generative listening; celebrating accomplishments;
and managing the distribution of your energy across a portfolio
of your roles. Most important is caring for the wellbeing of all
aspects of your diversity, and aligning these parts functionally
into a working whole.

Wholeness, at the
focus of reinventing leadership development, provides an invitation
to pay conscious attention to making every decision from the biggest
context that can put your arms around. I.e., one that is personally
meaningful to you. For some leaders, it will be the well-being
of the organisations members and other stakeholders. For
others it may be the evolutionary purpose of the enterprise. Yet
for others it will be evolution itself. Its all good, really.
But attention training will be needed till attending to the largest
whole becomes your second nature.

If you are an intentional
learner, and wish to accelerate your evolutionary journey, here
are some tips:

1. Read the Reinventing
Organizations
book,watch
the video,
and browse the
wiki.
2. Join a meet-up group or a community of practice or an online
network, focused on next-stage, or self-managing, or Teal organisations,
under any other name, and explore with them how to discover
next next stage in ones own life.
3. Subscribe to and get involved with Enlivening
Edge,
the online magazine of next-stage organisations.

This approach to
reinventing leadership development is not for everyone, but it
can be introduced on top of more traditional leadership development
effort, especially for those who want to move beyond what it offers.

Your highest-leverage
action to build capacity for organisational reinvention is to
become a next-stage mentor. Evolutionary mentoring,
as introduced here, is foundational to reinventing leadership
development, and it is always cross-mentoring that transforms
both the mentor and the mentee. Thats why its one
of my greatest joys.

Along with my colleague
Jackie Thoms, I will be offering a workshop during the Integral
European Conference
May 4-8, on how to mentor leaders of next-stage, or
what Laloux calls, Teal organisations.

This is work in progress,
evolving through the generative conversations with our clients
and colleagues. If you want to join the conversation, please comment
or ask your questions below.

We, at Future
Considerations, are working with our clients to help accelerate
their journey to the next level of potential. Our Teal mentoring
service is an emergent process that starts with a free, in-depth,
generative interview. The communication channels we use include:
face-to-face meetings, video calls, email, and a dedicated private
collaboration spaces. For more details, please get in contact

George
Pór
is an evolutionary thinker, Teal mentor, and advisor to culture
change and system transition in organisations. He is a Fellow
of Future Considerations and founder of Enlivening
Edge: News from Next-Stage Organizations
and the Teal Practice Group (London). George is the publisher
of the Blog of Collective Intelligence, and an independent scholar.
His former academic posts included INSEAD, London School of Economics
and UC Berkeley.

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